Program Description

EI is an exciting, hands-on summer course for high school students interested in engineering. This program is offered at the JHU Homewood campus in Baltimore, MD and at other locations in Maryland, California, the District of Columbia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. A residential experience is available at the JHU Homewood campus and Hood College.

Over four or five weeks (depending upon the location), students complete lab activities in computer engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, materials science, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering. They also prepare a presentation in response to a Request for Proposal, learn about engineering economics, write a research paper, take weekly quizzes, and complete a comprehensive final exam.

Students who earn an A or B grade in the course receive 3 credits from Johns Hopkins University.

The objective of this course is to introduce engineering ideas, thoughts, and problem-solving to potential engineering students and help them answer the questions: Is engineering for me? If so, what field? Team-time-cost management projects, multi-parameter problems, and problems without single correct solutions are emphasized. The course is intended to expose students to the framework within which engineers typically operate. Although the course is “field independent”, it does introduce students to problems and ideas from specific engineering disciplines.

Philosophy of Learning

Learning is synthesizing theory and knowledge in order to solve problems: not just theory out of context — the “what” — but also the “why”, “when”, and “under what conditions” the theory may be invoked to solve a problem. Learning is also discovering what doesn’t work.